NORTH OF ENSENADA, MEXICO

AUGUST

SATURDAY MORNING

LANE FRANKLIN TOLD HIMSELF that he shouldn’t freak out.

Most fifteen-year-olds would be high-fiving all over the place if they got to spend the summer in Ensenada. Beaches, bims, beer. Life didn’t get any better.

Not that All Saints School was exactly in Ensenada’s fast lane. Despite the sultry summer heat, no girls wearing butt-floss bikinis were shaking it on the school’s beautiful, very private beach. But his cottage was first class and the soccer field was awesome, and with the window open he could hear the surf that broke on the western edge of the campus.

With its scattered four-bedroom cottages, apartments for teachers, dorms for less wealthy students, and a small library/recreation center, All Saints looked like a high-end resort.

It wasn’t.

It was a church school where spoiled kids learned how to take orders, how to sit up straight, how to study, and how to be respectful.

Booorrrring.

I had it coming. What I did was a crime.

Even if it didn’t seem like it at the time.

Just a little finger time with his nifty new computer and his F’s turned into B’s in the school’s central computer. Too bad he got caught, and way too bad that his father suddenly decided he’d hang around long enough to see Lane registered in a more structured international boarding school.

At least they hadn’t caught him when he’d hacked into a military computer, or that bank, and five or six other sacred cows. Once he got inside, he hadn’t done anything except enjoy getting away with it.

Then he’d had the bright idea of changing his grades so his mother wouldn’t be upset at a row of D’s and F’s.

Everything’s okay.